For those unfamiliar with the policy, SWAM (an unofficial term) is LinkedIn’s “blunt instrument” for dealing with obnoxious posters or spam. What it means: If a moderator in any group flags a participant’s posts as unwelcome for any reason—real, imagined, temporarily or even by mistake—all future posts by the participant are also sent to the moderation penalty box in every other LinkedIn group, platform-wide. They’ve been “SWAM’ed”. Unless the policy changes at some future date, the penalty is forever, and there is no “undo”.

LinkedIn pen (Photo credit: TheSeafarer)

From the moment of SWAM-ing, all posts from that individual (comments, responses or questions) must await moderator review and approval before they appear. This is a giant obstacle in the respect that many group moderators are inattentive or absent, and even the most attentive moderators will only get to the flagged items at a pace of perhaps once a week.

The only remedy for a SWAM’ed individual is to petition every group moderator to manually “unflag” the user for that particular group. Customer service representatives apologize for the inconvenience, but can't (or won't) help. Meanwhile, many actual spammers simply create new identities after every blocking and continue to spam.

Why is this such a monumental problem? Numerous LinkedIn users and several experts have stepped forward during the past week to provide me with detail on the extent of the aggravation (and even the negative impacts to their business) of SWAM.

First, a perspective from LinkedIn expert Jason Alba, author of “I’m on LinkedIn: Now What???” In addition to his LinkedIn expertise, Alba is the author and speaker who founded job search resource www.JibberJobber.com. Says Alba: “I would suggest that Groups (and group discussions) are the #1 feature in LinkedIn for most people who are proactively using LinkedIn. Marketers, business owners, etc. are trying to get known, make a name for themselves, hawk their wares, etc., and the best and easiest place to do it is with Groups (if they do it right)."

"I have gotten emails from people who used to be active in Groups who said they went completely moderated... and now they don't get anything through. I am a group admin and I rarely take time to go through to see the moderated discussions... so I don't, unless someone emails me and asks to approve their contributions. The seriousness of this is that people will stop using Groups if they can't get their discussions or comments posted - they deem it a waste of time and move on...”

Perhaps no one has been more active in addressing the SWAM issue than Gary Ellenbogen, a professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in New York. Ellenbogen created a SWAM support group on LinkedIn (he’s created a companion group on + as well, which is the platform where many SWAM victims are beginning to migrate, he says).

Gary Ellenbogen has launched SWAM Support groups on LinkedIn and Google+

In an informal survey in his LinkedIn SWAM Support group of 162 members Ellenbogen shows that 20% to 25% of people who've been wrongfully SWAM'd are terminating their Premium Memberships with LinkedIn as a result. Says Ellenbogen: “If even 1% of LinkedIn’s 250 million members were SWAM'd, that’s 2.5 million members. At 20% defection, 500,000 revenue producing memberships would be destroyed by SWAM. If those 500,000 Premium Members were paying for even the least expensive upgrade to Talent Basic membership at $49.95 per month, LinkedIn would lose $600 a year times 500,000 memberships--$300 million dollars per year.”

LinkedIn user Matthew Weaver, owner of Project Weavers LLC in Vienna, Va., predicts the number of LinkedIn users who've been affected by SWAM may actually be 10 million or more. Up until SWAM emerged, Weaver participated in 50 groups (9 of which he controls) and attributed 100% of his business traffic to LinkedIn. Post SWAM, his traffic spun to a halt. He has a contact base of 16,500 on LinkedIn, but now he participates only in the groups he is able to moderate directly.

Weaver evaluated the number of users who'd been affected by the universal SWAM policy in one of his groups of 5,000 at the end of August 2013 and determined that a full 4.57% had been wrongfully flagged. Extending that percentage to the full LinkedIn universe of 225 million (which is now 277 million according to current LinkedIn reports) would mean there are more than 10 million users unfairly affected by SWAM. Meanwhile, the level of spam in the groups, he reports, has gone up.

An internal source in LinkedIn has indicated these external estimates are greatly beyond the actual numbers of individuals flagged, which LinkedIn's data indicates is closer to 100-200,000 in sum. The source declined to remark on any correlation between between the flagging and impact on LinkedIn revenue results, which were most recently reported last week, but noted that internal metrics show that spam diminished by 30-50% in the months that followed the rollout of the group moderation policies currently in effect. In a note of promising news, LinkedIn also confirmed there are further changes coming to its moderation policies shortly, which I will cover (hopefully within the coming weeks) in an additional post.

As to estimated impact on LinkedIn revenue, it is also important to note that while the vast majority of LinkedIn users use Groups and 60.6% consider Groups their third most valued LinkedIn feature, only 15.1% of LinkedIn users are paying subscribers, which is an important consideration in estimating the amount of revenue LinkedIn may be losing due to dissatisfaction over the issue of SWAM.

However, users such as Ellenbogen have ample reason to be angry about SWAM--his own SWAM-ing was the result of a moderator accident. He joined a group intended for only women participants, though the moderator--a man himself, ironically--had failed to mention or include the female-only criteria in the group's description and simply "flagged" Ellenbogen and other men who enrolled in the group by mistake. When Ellenbogen pointed out the ramifications, the moderator sent a letter of apology, which Ellenbogen provided to LinkedIn's Customer Support, to no avail. Not only did their "sorry about the inconvenience" response prove worthless, Ellenbogen provided me with screen shots to show that all trace of the incident and interaction has been erased and removed from his customer service history by LinkedIn.